optparse escaping control characters

optparse seems to be escaping control characters that I pass as arguments on the command line. Is this a bug? Am I missing something? Can this be prevented, or worked around? This behaviour doesn't occur with non-control characters. For example, if this program (called test.py): from optparse

Re: optparse escaping control characters

Thanks for all the responses! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list